Law Commons^™

Pain As Fact And Heuristic: How Pain Neuroimaging Illuminates Moral Dimensions Of Law, Amanda C. Pustilnik

Faculty Scholarship

Legal statuses, prohibitions, and protections often turn on the presence and degree of physical pain. In legal domains ranging from tort to torture, pain and its degree do important definitional work by delimiting boundaries of lawfulness and of entitlements. The omnipresence of pain in law suggests that the law embodies an intuition about the ontological primacy of pain. Yet, for all the work done by pain as a term in legal texts and practice, it has had a confounding lack of external verifiability. As with other subjective states, we have been able to impute pain’s presence but have not been …

Violence On The Brain: A Critique Of Neuroscience In Criminal Law, Amanda C. Pustilnik

Faculty Scholarship

Is there such a thing as a criminally "violent brain"? Does it make sense to speak of "the neurobiology of violence" or the "psychopathology of crime"? Is it possible to answer on a physiological level what makes one person engage in criminal violence and another not, under similar circumstances?

This Article first demonstrates parallels between certain current claims about the neurobiology of criminal violence and past movements that were concerned with the law and neuroscience of violence: phrenology, Lombrosian biological criminology, and lobotomy. It then engages in a substantive review and critique of several current claims about the neurological bases …

Judging Genes: Implications Of The Second Generation Of Genetic Tests In The Courtroom, Diane E. Hoffmann, Karen H. Rothenberg

Faculty Scholarship

The use of DNA tests for identification has revolutionized court proceedings in criminal and paternity cases. Now, requests by litigants to admit or compel a second generation of genetic tests – tests to confirm or predict genetic diseases and conditions – threaten to affect judicial decision-making in many more contexts. Unlike DNA tests for identification, these second generation tests may provide highly personal health and behavioral information about individuals and their relatives and will pose new challenges for trial court judges. This article reports on an original empirical study of how judges analyze these requests and uses the study results …